This weekend my little one was invited to her first birthday party of the year. I absolutely love getting to make gifts for the girls' friends. I love making things but am very practical and firmly believe one only needs so much stuff. So, once Liesie has a set of glitter stamps...that's it. I won't make her another, even if it is different because it just seems pointless to me. This leads me to occasionally forget to keep thinking of new ideas. Well, this week I found that kiddos' parties are a great cure!

We were quite sick this week, so I should have known I was making a mistake in trying to do something new and creative for the birthday girl's present. I received a second party invitation at school this week and I know of a good friend's child with a birthday this month (I expect we will be invited to his party) so I need to come up with a small slew of gifts in the comming weeks. Now, I clearly state that I need several days to process the glitter mounted stamps on the Valentine Set listing in my Etsy shop; nonetheless, i decided on Wednesday evening that I would make a letter set for Liesie's classmate the following day. I let her choose the glitter colors and such. Once I've done this there is no going back because she doesn't just forget about things like some kids do.

We have company coming this weekend too so our super-messy-four-people-were-sick-nothing-has-been-done-in-days house needed to be cleaned for Friday too. I was so tired after spending 5 hours at doctors' appointments that I did nothing on Thursday eveing!

At somepoint I thought a cute idea would be to make a letter set with a theme for regular occasions. Does this make sense? My pink and red set was Valentine's Day, I made a rainbow for a "regular" set but it seemed to be lacking something. The little girl with the party today had a short name so I needed to think of extra stamps rather than just working the letters out. I wound up going for a lady bug theme. I took some pictures (which didn't turn out fabulously because I was in a rush) which I'll post here. They turned out well. I was happy with them and I will be doing more this week for the next party....but I will not wait until Friday to start! I was up until 5am working on those stamps this morning. At some point I realized it might not be a good idea to make such detailed mounts because I couldn't expect someone to want to pay what I would need to charge to make them "worth it." They didn't turn out exactly as I had planned but were cute nonetheless. At about 3am I trashed one round mount and started a new one. This one I wound up omitting because I just couldn't get it to look quite right. I was left with 4 letter stamps, two lady bug themed stamps with cute mounts an ink pad and a little notebook. I won't even work out a price for something like this because like I said, it was a super crazy amount of work to decorate these mounts with different colors of glitter. However, I may add some cute sets like this to Etsy soon. I will need to down grade the mounts a little and will probably be able to keep it at about $30 like the currently listed letter set.

I'd love any other ideas you might have. I'm makeing an space shuttle themed set for the little boy's birthday next week and also thought of jungle animals, sports balls....If you'd like to see my take on something please leave a note and I'll post some of what I come up with here.